Determining whether something feeds me or if I feed it has changed my life. When something doesn’t work—after making sure I can’t change it—I cut it out of my life…and I don’t look back.

Don’t Be Afraid to Fail

This sort of ties into my talk about time being a finite resource. Steve Ray Vaughan had thirty-six years of time to use up. Janis Joplin had twenty-seven. Elizabeth Taylor had seventy-nine. When my time up, it’s over. Everything I’ve done will have to be enough.

I am fond of saying, “Time is short.” And it is shorter than it was one day ago or one minute ago. Failure embarrasses me—and I do have plenty of them—but I don’t want to get to the end of my life and realize I didn’t even try.

I look back over my years and see so many times I wouldn’t try because I was afraid of failing, of feeling embarrassed, or just didn’t know what to do.

It doesn’t really matter if I succeed or if I fail. What matters is what I learned along the way, and who I met, and how they touched my life. One hundred years from now, nobody is going to know or care that I existed, much less be worried about my failures.

Love Like You Mean It

This ties into my talk time being short.

None of us knows when the clock will run down–for ourselves or the ones we love. In 2010, we lost my maternal grandmother to cancer. We had to put her in a nursing home to assure she got the proper care in the last months of her life.

On the Saturdays I could, I’d cook lunch and take it to her. Gran would tell me about movies she’d liked–Mildred Pierce–and about the first time she met my Papaw–he was handsome.

The day eventually comes when there are no more chances to say, “I love you.” Time runs out.

So, when I love somebody, I say it and I show it. I do everything I can to love like I mean it.

Stevie Ray had it right:

What a long, strange trip it’s been. May you all have great success in the coming year. I’m glad we all found each other.

The first book in my Peri Jean Mace Ghost Thriller series is FREE right now. Click here to download it from a retailer.

Or join my mailing list. By joining my mailing list, you’ll not only get Forever Road as a free download, you’ll also get a few extra goodies.